Incorporating a Landscape Approach to Sustainable Land Use Finance

Background

Land use change is linked to over 75% of global biodiversity loss and a quarter of global GHG emissions. These changes are often enabled by investments from financial institutions – so if we are to meet the climate and biodiversity goals, financial institutions need to play an important role, not just in terms of managing environmental and social risks but also in contributing to bringing nature back.  

Investments that align with landscape approach could contribute to climate and biodiversity agenda at landscape level, strengthening ecosystem resilience and benefitting communities. On the other hand, if not planned and executed well, site-specific investments could have much larger negative impacts that extend beyond the boundaries of the project such as species extinction, loss of ecosystem functionality, and increased greenhouse gas emission. However, aligning your portfolio with a landscape approach comes with a number of challenges.

Webinar overview: Incorporating a Landscape Approach to Sustainable Land Use Finance 

This webinar on ‘Incorporating a Landscape Approach to Sustainable Land Use Finance’ was co-hosted by UNEP and UNEP-WCMC as part of the Land Use Finance Programme. 

Taking a landscape approach is at the centre of achieving many of the multilateral environmental goals, such as the draft post 2020 global biodiversity framework goals. However, there are challenges in developing a pipeline of investable projects in this space, and understanding how to get these complex, multi-stakeholder projects off the ground. This webinar brought together three speakers from very different organisations to address these issues and give us examples from their own work. 

Paul Chatterton, CEO of the Landscape Finance Lab, spoke first. He argued that the conservation community needs to be able to take their projects to a larger scale, and source the necessary finance in order to do that. Taking a landscape approach offers a way to do this, as well as a method to work ‘at the scale of nature’, have longer term impact, and access larger amounts of funding by working with multiple sectors in one landscape. Developing a landscape approach requires working with many stakeholders, and focusing on how projects across the landscape can cohesively contribute to sustainable development as well as protecting nature.  The 4 Returns Framework outlines a methodology for creating a landscape level plan. 

Working at a landscape level also provides more opportunities to access large scale funding by providing a method by which conservation projects can reach the scale required by commercial investors – who are generally looking for $100 million + investments. After giving some examples of where a landscape approach has been successfully integrated. Paul finished with a challenge to the audience. He argued that there are about 1000 landscapes in this planet, but only 100 contain most of the carbon, freshwater, biodiversity and poverty – which are the landscape that need our attention. Given that it costs less than a fighter jet to sustainably invest in a landscape, he argued, it should not be impossible to secure the financing to get each of these 100 landscapes up to a sustainable standard.  

Gita Syahrani, Head of Secretariat at Lingkar Temu Kabupaten Lestari, spoke next. LTKL is an association of nine district governments in Indonesia, all of whom are committed to developing more sustainable ways of working across their jurisdictions. They are focused on increasing regional competitiveness by developing a value-add model for nature-based competitive industry – providing a business case for conservation. LTKL encourages their collaborators to not look at sustainability as a burden, but as an opportunity to grow.  

Neighbouring district governments working with LTKL are using a landscape approach as a way to address issues that run across their administrative boundaries. For example, in West Kalimantan, two districts are working together on a shared plan for sustainable management of both their jurisdictions. LTKL is helping these districts to measure their performance on sustainability goals in both a process and target level, and is helping join up district governments with private incentives. Gita emphasised the value in working with media to create good exposure for both districts and private investors – as this helps create good motivation for the players as momentum is growing. 

LTKL have developed a regional competitiveness framework – their way to bring together the compliance and investment parts of the equation, and articulate what it means to be competitive in this space. They are also developing shared case studies from different jurisdictions, to show shared progress resulting from taking a landscape approach. 

Finally we heard from Adrian Lain Perez, from SAIL Ventures who manage the &Green Fund. The &Green Fund is focused on commercial projects in agricultural value chains, which help with the restoration of forests and make agriculture more sustainable and inclusive. In their work they define the ‘landscape’ as where the industry has some sort of influence, and has leverage to create environmental and social returns. They have a variety of impact indicators which they select from for each project based on the type of landscape identified: forest restored, forest conserved, land sustainably intensified that leads to avoided deforestation, as well as households benefited and smallholders benefitted, the latter two being used to track livelihoods impacts.  

A landscape approach gives a way to look at all the impacts of an investment – and ultimately allows for impact that is greater than it would have been otherwise, and more transformational. Adrian gave the example of a project that &Green had invested in with a palm oil company in Kalimantan. The company had plantation concessions which were a part of the focus landscape, but the project also looked at their wider supply chain, including small holders, to help the company move to NDPE compliance throughout all of their supply chain.   

Date: Tuesday 21st September; 12 noon CET 

Duration: 1:00h  

Experts in the field presented the criticality of taking a landscape approach to advancing many of the foundational biodiversity and climate goals. Paul Chatterton, CEO of the Landscape Finance Lab gave an introduction to landscape/jurisdictional approaches and discussed how are they linked to biodiversity, climate change mitigation, and adaptation goals. Gita Syahrani, Head of Secretariat of Sustainable District Association, Lingkar Temu Kabupaten Lestari, then provided a case study of how LKTL executes a jurisdictional approach across the landscapes they manage in Indonesia, and how they have worked with investors in this way to create further impact. Finally, Adrian Lain Perez, Sustainability Analyst at SAIL Ventures discussed how they worked with &Green to integrate a landscape approach in their investments.  

Listen back to the webinar below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOijkzUvfgA